The Enemy Within

In 1942, Nazi Saboteurs Came Ashore With A Plan To Cripple America

September 22, 1985|By Article by Edward Baumann and John O`Brien. Edward Baumann and John O`Brien are Tribune reporters.

Haupt carried a money belt containing $3,900 in American currency, and papers identifying him as Larry Jordan. German intelligence had picked the name from a list of missing GIs. The real Lawrence J. Jordan, a 23-year-old Army sergeant from Chicago, had been captured at Bataan in the Philippines and was a prisoner in Japan.

The trans-Atlantic trip took 15 days, and the saboteurs were literally ripe for action when it came time to be put ashore. No one except food handlers was allowed to bathe in the cramped submarine quarters because of the scarcity of fresh water.

``Schnell! Schnell!`` Dasch whispered as the first team went over the side at the stroke of midnight on June 13 and scurried aboard the rubber raft. They put ashore less than 20 miles from the tip of Long Island`s Montauk Point, where they buried four crates of explosives and exchanged their wet uniforms for the civilian clothes they had brought along in watertight seabags.

``Gut,`` Dasch said approvingly when the four fishermen, as they now appeared, faced one another on the beach. ``From now on we speak only English. Let`s get the hell out of here!``

Four nights later, a similar scene was repeated on the Florida sands.

Quickly, this second group of men climbed out of their sweaty uniforms and donned civilian clothes with American labels. They buried the military garb (which they wore on landing to avoid being shot as spies in the event of capture)

with their cache of explosives and took off in different directions.

Haupt boarded a train in Jacksonville for Chicago, where the plan called for him to get his old job back at Simpson Optical long enough to put the plant out of commission. He had been gone for more than a year from his home in the 2300 block of North Fremont Street. His father, Hans, a painter and bricklayer, and his mother, Erna, had not heard from him since he wired from Tokyo 10 months earlier. Instead of going home, however, he went directly to the house of an uncle, Walter Froehling, a Nazi sympathizer, who lived in the 3600 block of North Whipple Street. As Haupt confided the grand scheme to his uncle, the mission to knock the guts out of his adopted country`s war effort was already falling apart.

The FBI files suggest that Dasch, the carefully chosen leader of the band of saboteurs, might have been something other than a German espionage agent. Dasch, Burger, Quirin and Heinck had just finished burying their Nazi uniforms and supplies in the sand on Long Island when they were accosted by an unarmed Coast Guardsman patroling the beach.

``Hey! What are you guys doing out here?`` demanded Seaman 2C John Cullen.

Inexplicably, the German leader advanced to within a foot of the curly-haired sailor, eyeball to eyeball, and deftly stuffed something into the youth`s pocket. ``Don`t concern yourself with us,`` the German said softly.

``Here is something for you. Now, take a good look at me. I want to be quite sure you will know me again.``

With that Dasch backed off, beckoned to his companions, and they disappeared into the night.

Cullen reached into the pocket of his dungarees to see what the man had deposited. His hand came up clutching $260 in cash.

The seaman double-timed back to Coast Guard headquarters and blurted out what happened to Capt. J.S. Bayliss, his commanding officer. Bayliss was already apprehensive. Several other guardsmen had reported the throaty drone of powerful engines shortly after midnight just off shore, but were unable to see anything in the dense fog.

The CO sent an armed detail back with Cullen, but the strangers were nowhere to be found.

At sunup a beach patrol discovered tracks in the sand where the invaders had buried their supplies. The seamen unearthed four wooden crates and a seabag containing German uniforms. The booty was taken back to headquarters, where the crates were pried open. They contained TNT, bombs shaped to resemble lumps of coal, time clocks, fuses and caps, detonators, incendiary pencils and pens, and delayed-action bombs. Bayliss called the FBI.

At 11 a.m. Special Agent T.J. Donegan, head of the New York field office, accompanied by agents C.F. Lanman and E.F. Emrich, sped to Coast Guard headquarters to assume jurisdiction in the case.

The FBI inventoried the contrabrand and launched a search throughout the New York area for the four invaders.

The men in the second sub had not yet landed when, on the evening of June 14th, Special Agent S.D. McWhorter answered the phone in the New York FBI office. ``My name is Frank Daniel Pastorius, and I am calling your office so that an official record can be made of this call. I just arrived from Germany,`` said a male voice on the other end.